


do you remember (when we met)

by plinys



Series: ABC Fic Challenge [17]
Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/M, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 16:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4528809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t realize until years later, that she never offered him her name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do you remember (when we met)

**Author's Note:**

> Gwen said she wanted Peggy smoking so this fic happened. Also for the abc fic challenge, my word is "quit." 
> 
> Apologies for being unbeta'd.

1

There’s a recruiter at her school, a man in a sharp uniform.

It’s not uncommon, these men coming around, getting any young man old enough and strong enough to throw himself into the battle.   _Don’t you want to stop Hitler_ , they say in concerned tones until each boy stands up.

For the girls it’s nursing, or staying home and writing letters to the boys who will die on the fields.

So Peggy slips away, ignores the worried looks of her friends, until she’s free of the stifling room.

It takes her a second before she realizes she’s not alone. There’s another of those men outside, his jackets got a pin with the allied logo pinned to it, and his face is vaguely familiar, as he asks if she has a light.

“I know you from somewhere,” she says, as she pulls the lighter out of her pocket, and offers it to him in exchange for a cigarette.

His accent is strongly American, as he replies, “I have one of those faces, pal.”

She accepts the answer for what it is.

“How would you like to fight on the front lines?”

Peggy snorts, the unladylike noise that her mother had tried for years to train out of her, and lets the cigarette dangle from her fingers, “They’d never let me.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m a lady, it’s my job to sit prim and proper, maybe work in the factories if my family was less well off. I’ll write letters to the boys – to you if you’d like – but that’s all I’m ever going to be good for,” her voice is bitter, the words all too familiar having been heard from other’s lips.

He doesn’t appear put off by what she says, instead simply replies. “Whoever told you that was lying. Miss Carter, I would like to offer you a position that I don’t exactly have permission to give out.”

She doesn’t realize until years later, that she never offered him her name. Too blinded by the chance and the opportunity before her.

 

 

2

Her lips are stained red, tasting of nicotine, as she breathes the smoke out into the cold evening air. There’s footsteps behind her, the click of far too expensive shoes on a wooden deck.

“Shouldn’t you be in New York?” Peggy asks, without having to turn around to look at her companion.

His reply is a while coming, only after he’s settled down beside her, legs swung over the edge of the deck, and he’s stolen the cigarette from between her lips to put it between his own. “I’ll fly out there in the morning. Need a flight in?”

She shakes her head.

 _We can’t keep doing this_ , she wants to say, but instead she bites her tongue, and says words crueler than that, “Have you met him? The one Erskine chose? Steve’s really remarkable.”

His reaction is predictably bitter, “Not yet.”

Within twenty-four hours his tone will change on that matter. In the next twenty-four hours will change everything.

 

 

3

She offers Steve one, unthinkingly after a meeting, because there’s a pack in her pocket (a gift from an old friend) and the Commandos had been complaining about rationing. She’s admittedly surprised when he turns her offer down.

“I don’t mind sharing,” Peggy insists.

“No that’s not it. Honestly, Peggy, it’s a bit embarrassing. See I had asthma before all of this, weak lungs, never picked up the habit and now,” he trails off, looking a bit embarrassed by the whole situation, “Figure it won’t affect me.”

She tucks the pack back in her pocket, and talks about meaningless things instead, until they can both nearly forget they’re fighting a war.

Later she’ll place her pack on a desk, cluttered with blueprints for weapons and half-empty coffee mugs, and hope someone else can find a use for it.

 

4

“Shouldn’t you be celebrating? We won the war?” He asks of her, when he finds her standing on the edge of the dock.

Her cheeks are puffy from crying, so she doesn’t look his way, the last thing she wants is comfort.  She’s left the festivities behind. Her heels kicked off somewhere behind her, and there’s a hole in the toe of her stockings that she tries to forget about.

She’s tried to forget about a lot lately.

He takes her silence for what is it, not pushing her to talk about it, for which Peggy’s thankful for.

Instead his tone is light and almost jovial, “I’d offer you a smoke, but my pack got soaked when somebody pushed me in the Thames.”

Her voice is still tight, when she replies, “You’re not still mad about that are you?” But he doesn’t notice, or at least pretends not to.  

 

 

5

There’s a sheet curled around her waist, her carefully done up curls now a mess, her lipstick smudged beyond repair. This is the part of the night where she’s supposed to feel satisfied, instead she wants to get up out of the bed, put the clothing she had abandoned along the way back on and pretend the night never happened.

Instead, she lights up a cigarette, from the stash on his nightstand.

“I’m quitting,” Peggy says, even as she brings it up to her lips.

“You’ve said that before,” comes the reply from the bed, his fingers brushing against the exposed plains of her back. A touch which had felt comforting before feels

“We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“You’ve said that before too.”

She has, maybe not with those exact words, but they’ve been saying it to each other since they first met, with conspiratorial gazes, secrets that only they knew.

“I’m serious,” she insists, “I’ve heard the whispers, for a group of spies they’re not as secretive as they’d like to let us believe. Everyone already assumes that we’re having an affair.”

“It’s not like that, pal, you know it-“

“But what does it look like when the Director and the Assistant Director of SHIELD are sleeping together?”

He doesn’t have an answer for her, she knows he doesn’t. That’s the thing about him, he never thinks of the consequences, and she used to try not to. Somewhere along the way she must have forgotten how to.

She puts the cigarette out, letting it fall into the ash tray, with a sense of finality.

 

+1

Winters are supposed to be cold, and funerals a somber affair.

She stands there in a well-worn black dress, trying not to stare at a coffin, saying words that seem meaningless to describe the man she’s lost. They both had too many secrets and too many lies to spill out in a eulogy.

“Howard Stark was a hero,” she says, because that’s what he would wanted to have heard. He was a vain sort of fellow, and for years they would only ever say nice things in his memory.

Her eyes scan the crowd one last time, and for a second Peggy thinks she sees a ghost.

A young man in a black pea coat, with a familiar face, lighting up a cigarette in the back row, before walking away.

 

 

 

 


End file.
